[SLATERenters the living room of the perpetually dark three-bedroom house he sublets withZACKandSCREECH. He wears flared warm-up pants, a neon spandex tank top, and horn-rimmed glasses, and his hair is tied in a ponytail.]

SLATER: Did you do the Milton reading for our Early Modern seminar, preppy?

[ZACKsits on a futon under framed posters of T.S. Eliot, John Cheever, and Bret Easton Ellis.]

ZACK: Just because I’m writing my dissertation on the anxiety of influence of Tender Is the Night on Richard Yates’s midcareer short fiction doesn’t mean I’m a preppy, you medievalist.

SLATER: Yeah—and Screech isn’t a dweeb for studying the intersection of science and the gothic novel during the 18th century and its relation to Pynchonesque paranoia.

[SCREECHcrawls out from under a mountain of library books, simultaneously reading an academic book on leeches and a heavily dog-eared copy of Gravity’s Rainbow.]

SCREECH: According to the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, pretty accurate … and hard!

[JESSIEopens the door. She’s clad in a black leather jacket, her hair is cut short and jagged and is dyed blue, and she’s chain-smoking Marlboros.]

JESSIE: (Excitedly.) I’m so stressed; I have two papers due tomorrow; I need some whiskey.

ZACK: Jessie, you’re not back on those caffeine pills, are you?

JESSIE: No, why?

ZACK: I want to give a few to Nerdstrom; I need him to be sharp: he’s writing my application to the Fitzgerald conference in Maryland for me, in exchange for being introduced to some girls in the sculpture program at the next Graduate Council mixer.

SLATER: Oink, oink, mama. And I mean that in the most Orwellian and neo-Freudian senses.

ZACK: As Henri Bergson might say, “Time-out!” Can you two ever have a conversation without it devolving into a dispute over phallologocentrism?

[LISApokes her head in the window, struggling to get through with her Afro.]

LISA: Salaam alaikum, brothers and sister. My Shakespeare study group meets in an hour—what can I say about othering and the male gaze in Othello?

SCREECH: Well, Stephen Greenblatt argues that homosocial tensions in the Globe Theatre may have contributed to—

ZACK: No, you homophone—the male G-A-Z-E, not G-A-Y-S.

[KELLYjoins the group. Her ripped T-shirt readsFREEMUMIA.]

KELLY: Are you guys busy?

JESSIE: “Guys”?

KELLY: Sorry. I could use your opinions on the title for my colloquium presentation: “Disco Balls and Lyricless Synthesizer Music: A Situationist Critique of the Prom in Post-Vietnam Literature.”

ZACK: Who cares? It’s happy hour at the Max—let’s toast to Bacchus like the Lost Generation 2.0 we are.

SLATER: I hope we don’t run into Department Chair Belding there.

JESSIE: That guy is so creepy—I still can’t believe he joined an accelerated Ph.D. program at Stansbury, followed us all out to Berkeley, and somehow politically maneuvered to become head of the English Department.

LISA: He’s such an imperialist oppressor—a Kipling without conscience. And no fashion sense at all with that tired, leather-patched corduroy jacket from 1973.

KELLY: He always hits on me by reciting the same Marvell poem and asking if I want to work with him on an independent study—gross!

SCREECH: Compared to him, I’m a regular Dom Juan!

SLATER: Yeah, what a knavish, elf-witted coxcomb.

[They repair to the Max. After several pitchers of PBR, ZACKsleeps withKELLY(the audience oohs) and asks her not to tell anyone, SLATERandJESSIEget in a fight over gender essentialism before sleeping together [the audience oohs again], andSCREECHunsuccessfully attempts to wooLISAwith his postcolonial reading of The Tempest before dropping out and returning to Bayside High to teach ninth-grade English.]